5 StatusNet 0.8.1 ("Second Guessing")
8 This is the README file for StatusNet (formerly Laconica), the Open
9 Source microblogging platform. It includes installation instructions,
10 descriptions of options you can set, warnings, tips, and general info
11 for administrators. Information on using StatusNet can be found in the
12 "doc" subdirectory or in the "help" section on-line.
17 StatusNet (formerly Laconica) is a Free and Open Source microblogging
18 platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange
19 short (140 character) messages over the Web. Users can choose which
20 people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or colleagues'
21 status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter,
22 Jaiku, Yammer, and Plurk.
24 With a little work, status messages can be sent to mobile phones,
25 instant messenger programs (GTalk/Jabber), and specially-designed
26 desktop clients that support the Twitter API.
28 StatusNet supports an open standard called OpenMicroBlogging
29 <http://openmicroblogging.org/> that lets users on different Web sites
30 or in different companies subscribe to each others' notices. It
31 enables a distributed social network spread all across the Web.
33 StatusNet was originally developed for the Open Software Service,
34 Identi.ca <http://identi.ca/>. It is shared with you in hope that you
35 too make an Open Software Service available to your users. To learn
36 more, please see the Open Software Service Definition 1.1:
38 http://www.opendefinition.org/ossd
40 StatusNet, Inc. <http://status.net/> also offers this software as a
41 Web service, requiring no installation on your part. The software run
42 on status.net is identical to the software available for download, so
43 you can move back and forth between a hosted version or a version
44 installed on your own servers.
49 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
50 it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
51 published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
52 License, or (at your option) any later version.
54 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
55 WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
56 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
57 Affero General Public License for more details.
59 You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public
60 License along with this program, in the file "COPYING". If not, see
61 <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
63 IMPORTANT NOTE: The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) has
64 *different requirements* from the "regular" GPL. In particular, if
65 you make modifications to the StatusNet source code on your server,
66 you *MUST MAKE AVAILABLE* the modified version of the source code
67 to your users under the same license. This is a legal requirement
68 of using the software, and if you do not wish to share your
69 modifications, *YOU MAY NOT INSTALL STATUSNET*.
71 Additional library software has been made available in the 'extlib'
72 directory. All of it is Free Software and can be distributed under
73 liberal terms, but those terms may differ in detail from the AGPL's
74 particulars. See each package's license file in the extlib directory
80 This is a minor feature and bugfix release since version 0.8.0,
81 released Jul 15 2009. Notable changes this version:
83 - Laconica has been renamed StatusNet. With a few minor compatibility
84 exceptions, all references to "Laconica" in code, documentation
85 and comments were changed to "StatusNet".
86 - A new plugin to support "infinite scroll".
87 - A new plugin to support reCaptcha <http://recaptcha.net>.
88 - Better logging of server errors.
89 - Add an Openid-only mode for authentication.
90 - 'lite' parameter for some Twitter API methods.
91 - A new plugin to auto-complete nicknames for @-replies.
92 - Configuration options to disable OpenID, SMS, Twitter, post-by-email, and IM.
93 - Support for lighttpd <http://lighttpd.org/> using 404-based
95 - Support for using Twitter's OAuth authentication as a client.
96 - First version of the groups API.
97 - Can configure a site-wide design, including background image and
99 - Improved algorithm for replies and conversations, making
100 conversation trees more accurate and useful.
101 - Add a script to create a simulation database for testing/debugging.
102 - Sanitize HTML for OEmbed.
103 - Improved queue management for DB-based queuing.
104 - More complete URL detection.
105 - Hashtags now support full Unicode character set.
106 - Notice inboxes are now garbage-collected on a regular basis
107 at notice-write time.
108 - PiwikAnalyticsPlugin updated for latest Piwik interface.
109 - Attachment and notice pages can be embedded with OEmbed
110 <http://www.oembed.com>.
111 - Failed authentication is logged.
112 - PostgreSQL schema and support brought up-to-date with 0.8.x features.
113 - The installer works with PostgreSQL as well as MySQL.
114 - RSS 1.0 feeds use HTTP Basic authentication in private mode.
115 - Many, many bug fixes, particularly with performance.
116 - Better (=working) garbage collection for old sessions.
117 - Better (=working) search queries.
118 - Some cleanup of HTML output.
119 - Better error handling when updating Facebook.
120 - Considerably better performance when using replication for API
122 - Initial unit tests.
127 The following software packages are *required* for this software to
130 - PHP 5.2.3+. It may be possible to run this software on earlier
131 versions of PHP, but many of the functions used are only available
133 - MySQL 5.x. The StatusNet database is stored, by default, in a MySQL
134 server. It has been primarily tested on 5.x servers, although it may
135 be possible to install on earlier (or later!) versions. The server
136 *must* support the MyISAM storage engine -- the default for most
137 MySQL servers -- *and* the InnoDB storage engine.
138 - A Web server. Preferably, you should have Apache 2.2.x with the
139 mod_rewrite extension installed and enabled.
141 Your PHP installation must include the following PHP extensions:
143 - Curl. This is for fetching files by HTTP.
144 - XMLWriter. This is for formatting XML and HTML output.
145 - MySQL. For accessing the database.
146 - GD. For scaling down avatar images.
147 - mbstring. For handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded strings.
148 - gettext. For multiple languages. Default on many PHP installs.
150 For some functionality, you will also need the following extensions:
152 - Memcache. A client for the memcached server, which caches database
153 information in volatile memory. This is important for adequate
154 performance on high-traffic sites. You will also need a memcached
155 server to store the data in.
156 - Mailparse. Efficient parsing of email requires this extension.
157 Submission by email or SMS-over-email uses this extension.
158 - Sphinx Search. A client for the sphinx server, an alternative
159 to MySQL or Postgresql fulltext search. You will also need a
160 Sphinx server to serve the search queries.
162 You will almost definitely get 2-3 times better performance from your
163 site if you install a PHP bytecode cache/accelerator. Some well-known
164 examples are: eaccelerator, Turck mmcache, xcache, apc. Zend Optimizer
165 is a proprietary accelerator installed on some hosting sites.
170 A number of external PHP libraries are used to provide basic
171 functionality and optional functionality for your system. For your
172 convenience, they are available in the "extlib" directory of this
173 package, and you do not have to download and install them. However,
174 you may want to keep them up-to-date with the latest upstream version,
175 and the URLs are listed here for your convenience.
177 - DB_DataObject http://pear.php.net/package/DB_DataObject
178 - Validate http://pear.php.net/package/Validate
179 - OpenID from OpenIDEnabled (not the PEAR version!). We decided
180 to use the openidenabled.com version since it's more widely
181 implemented, and seems to be better supported.
182 http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
183 - PEAR DB. Although this is an older data access system (new
184 packages should probably use PHP DBO), the OpenID libraries
185 depend on PEAR DB so we use it here, too. DB_DataObject can
186 also use PEAR MDB2, which may give you better performance
187 but won't work with OpenID.
188 http://pear.php.net/package/DB
189 - OAuth.php from http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/
190 - markdown.php from http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
191 - PEAR Mail, for sending out mail notifications
192 http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
193 - PEAR Net_SMTP, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
194 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_SMTP
195 - PEAR Net_Socket, if you use the SMTP factory for notifications
196 http://pear.php.net/package/Net_Socket
197 - XMPPHP, the follow-up to Class.Jabber.php. Probably the best XMPP
198 library available for PHP. http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/. Note that
199 as of this writing the version of this library that is available in
200 the extlib directory is *significantly different* from the upstream
201 version (patches have been submitted). Upgrading to the upstream
202 version may render your StatusNet site unable to send or receive XMPP
204 - Facebook library. Used for the Facebook application.
205 - PEAR Services_oEmbed. Used for some multimedia integration.
206 - PEAR HTTP_Request is an oEmbed dependency.
207 - PEAR Validate is an oEmbed dependency.
208 - PEAR Net_URL2 is an oEmbed dependency.
209 - Console_GetOpt for parsing command-line options.
211 A design goal of StatusNet is that the basic Web functionality should
212 work on even the most restrictive commercial hosting services.
213 However, additional functionality, such as receiving messages by
214 Jabber/GTalk, require that you be able to run long-running processes
215 on your account. In addition, posting by email or from SMS require
216 that you be able to install a mail filter in your mail server.
221 Installing the basic StatusNet Web component is relatively easy,
222 especially if you've previously installed PHP/MySQL packages.
224 1. Unpack the tarball you downloaded on your Web server. Usually a
225 command like this will work:
227 tar zxf statusnet-0.8.1.tar.gz
229 ...which will make a statusnet-0.8.1 subdirectory in your current
230 directory. (If you don't have shell access on your Web server, you
231 may have to unpack the tarball on your local computer and FTP the
232 files to the server.)
234 2. Move the tarball to a directory of your choosing in your Web root
235 directory. Usually something like this will work:
237 mv statusnet-0.8.1 /var/www/mublog
239 This will make your StatusNet instance available in the mublog path of
240 your server, like "http://example.net/mublog". "microblog" or
241 "statusnet" might also be good path names. If you know how to
242 configure virtual hosts on your web server, you can try setting up
243 "http://micro.example.net/" or the like.
245 3. Make your target directory writeable by the Web server.
247 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/
249 On some systems, this will probably work:
251 chgrp www-data /var/www/mublog/
252 chmod g+w /var/www/mublog/
254 If your Web server runs as another user besides "www-data", try
255 that user's default group instead. As a last resort, you can create
256 a new group like "mublog" and add the Web server's user to the group.
258 4. You should also take this moment to make your avatar, background, and
259 file subdirectories writeable by the Web server. An insecure way to do
262 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/avatar
263 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/background
264 chmod a+w /var/www/mublog/file
266 You can also make the avatar, background, and file directories
267 writeable by the Web server group, as noted above.
269 5. Create a database to hold your microblog data. Something like this
272 mysqladmin -u "username" --password="password" create statusnet
274 Note that StatusNet must have its own database; you can't share the
275 database with another program. You can name it whatever you want,
278 (If you don't have shell access to your server, you may need to use
279 a tool like PHPAdmin to create a database. Check your hosting
280 service's documentation for how to create a new MySQL database.)
282 6. Create a new database account that StatusNet will use to access the
283 database. If you have shell access, this will probably work from the
286 GRANT ALL on statusnet.*
287 TO 'lacuser'@'localhost'
288 IDENTIFIED BY 'lacpassword';
290 You should change 'lacuser' and 'lacpassword' to your preferred new
291 username and password. You may want to test logging in to MySQL as
294 7. In a browser, navigate to the StatusNet install script; something like:
296 http://yourserver.example.com/mublog/install.php
298 Enter the database connection information and your site name. The
299 install program will configure your site and install the initial,
300 almost-empty database.
302 8. You should now be able to navigate to your microblog's main directory
303 and see the "Public Timeline", which will be empty. If not, magic
304 has happened! You can now register a new user, post some notices,
305 edit your profile, etc. However, you may want to wait to do that stuff
306 if you think you can set up "fancy URLs" (see below), since some
307 URLs are stored in the database.
312 By default, StatusNet will use URLs that include the main PHP program's
313 name in them. For example, a user's home profile might be
316 http://example.org/mublog/index.php/mublog/fred
318 On certain systems that don't support this kind of syntax, they'll
321 http://example.org/mublog/index.php?p=mublog/fred
323 It's possible to configure the software so it looks like this instead:
325 http://example.org/mublog/fred
327 These "fancy URLs" are more readable and memorable for users. To use
328 fancy URLs, you must either have Apache 2.x with .htaccess enabled and
329 mod_redirect enabled, -OR- know how to configure "url redirection" in
332 1. Copy the htaccess.sample file to .htaccess in your StatusNet
333 directory. Note: if you have control of your server's httpd.conf or
334 similar configuration files, it can greatly improve performance to
335 import the .htaccess file into your conf file instead. If you're
336 not sure how to do it, you may save yourself a lot of headache by
337 just leaving the .htaccess file.
339 2. Change the "RewriteBase" in the new .htaccess file to be the URL path
340 to your StatusNet installation on your server. Typically this will
341 be the path to your StatusNet directory relative to your Web root.
343 3. Add or uncomment or change a line in your config.php file so it says:
345 $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
347 You should now be able to navigate to a "fancy" URL on your server,
350 http://example.net/mublog/main/register
352 If you changed your HTTP server configuration, you may need to restart
358 To use a Sphinx server to search users and notices, you also need
359 to install, compile and enable the sphinx pecl extension for php on the
360 client side, which itself depends on the sphinx development files.
361 "pecl install sphinx" should take care of that. Add "extension=sphinx.so"
362 to your php.ini and reload apache to enable it.
364 You can update your MySQL or Postgresql databases to drop their fulltext
365 search indexes, since they're now provided by sphinx.
367 On the sphinx server side, a script reads the main database and build
368 the keyword index. A cron job reads the database and keeps the sphinx
369 indexes up to date. scripts/sphinx-cron.sh should be called by cron
370 every 5 minutes, for example. scripts/sphinx.sh is an init.d script
371 to start and stop the sphinx search daemon.
376 StatusNet supports a cheap-and-dirty system for sending update messages
377 to mobile phones and for receiving updates from the mobile. Instead of
378 sending through the SMS network itself, which is costly and requires
379 buy-in from the wireless carriers, it simply piggybacks on the email
380 gateways that many carriers provide to their customers. So, SMS
381 configuration is essentially email configuration.
383 Each user sends to a made-up email address, which they keep a secret.
384 Incoming email that is "From" the user's SMS email address, and "To"
385 the users' secret email address on the site's domain, will be
386 converted to a notice and stored in the DB.
388 For this to work, there *must* be a domain or sub-domain for which all
389 (or most) incoming email can pass through the incoming mail filter.
391 1. Run the SQL script carrier.sql in your StatusNet database. This will
394 mysql -u "lacuser" --password="lacpassword" statusnet < db/carrier.sql
396 This will populate your database with a list of wireless carriers
397 that support email SMS gateways.
399 2. Make sure the maildaemon.php file is executable:
401 chmod +x scripts/maildaemon.php
403 Note that "daemon" is kind of a misnomer here; the script is more
404 of a filter than a daemon.
406 2. Edit /etc/aliases on your mail server and add the following line:
408 *: /path/to/statusnet/scripts/maildaemon.php
410 3. Run whatever code you need to to update your aliases database. For
411 many mail servers (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail), this should work:
415 You may need to restart your mail server for the new database to
418 4. Set the following in your config.php file:
420 $config['mail']['domain'] = 'yourdomain.example.net';
422 At this point, post-by-email and post-by-SMS-gateway should work. Note
423 that if your mail server is on a different computer from your email
424 server, you'll need to have a full installation of StatusNet, a working
425 config.php, and access to the StatusNet database from the mail server.
430 XMPP (eXtended Message and Presence Protocol, <http://xmpp.org/>) is the
431 instant-messenger protocol that drives Jabber and GTalk IM. You can
432 distribute messages via XMPP using the system below; however, you
433 need to run the XMPP incoming daemon to allow incoming messages as
436 1. You may want to strongly consider setting up your own XMPP server.
437 Ejabberd, OpenFire, and JabberD are all Open Source servers.
438 Jabber, Inc. provides a high-performance commercial server.
440 2. You must register a Jabber ID (JID) with your new server. It helps
441 to choose a name like "update@example.com" or "notice" or something
442 similar. Alternately, your "update JID" can be registered on a
443 publicly-available XMPP service, like jabber.org or GTalk.
445 StatusNet will not register the JID with your chosen XMPP server;
446 you need to do this manually, with an XMPP client like Gajim,
447 Telepathy, or Pidgin.im.
449 3. Configure your site's XMPP variables, as described below in the
450 configuration section.
452 On a default installation, your site can broadcast messages using
453 XMPP. Users won't be able to post messages using XMPP unless you've
454 got the XMPP daemon running. See 'Queues and daemons' below for how
455 to set that up. Also, once you have a sizable number of users, sending
456 a lot of SMS, OMB, and XMPP messages whenever someone posts a message
457 can really slow down your site; it may cause posting to timeout.
459 NOTE: stream_select(), a crucial function for network programming, is
460 broken on PHP 5.2.x less than 5.2.6 on amd64-based servers. We don't
461 work around this bug in StatusNet; current recommendation is to move
462 off of amd64 to another server.
467 You can send *all* messages from your microblogging site to a
468 third-party service using XMPP. This can be useful for providing
469 search, indexing, bridging, or other cool services.
471 To configure a downstream site to receive your public stream, add
472 their "JID" (Jabber ID) to your config.php as follows:
474 $config['xmpp']['public'][] = 'downstream@example.net';
476 (Don't miss those square brackets at the end.) Note that your XMPP
477 broadcasting must be configured as mentioned above. Although you can
478 send out messages at "Web time", high-volume sites should strongly
479 consider setting up queues and daemons.
484 Some activities that StatusNet needs to do, like broadcast OMB, SMS,
485 and XMPP messages, can be 'queued' and done by off-line bots instead.
486 For this to work, you must be able to run long-running offline
487 processes, either on your main Web server or on another server you
488 control. (Your other server will still need all the above
489 prerequisites, with the exception of Apache.) Installing on a separate
490 server is probably a good idea for high-volume sites.
492 1. You'll need the "CLI" (command-line interface) version of PHP
493 installed on whatever server you use.
495 2. If you're using a separate server for queues, install StatusNet
496 somewhere on the server. You don't need to worry about the
497 .htaccess file, but make sure that your config.php file is close
498 to, or identical to, your Web server's version.
500 3. In your config.php files (both the Web server and the queues
501 server!), set the following variable:
503 $config['queue']['enabled'] = true;
505 You may also want to look at the 'daemon' section of this file for
506 more daemon options. Note that if you set the 'user' and/or 'group'
507 options, you'll need to create that user and/or group by hand.
508 They're not created automatically.
510 4. On the queues server, run the command scripts/startdaemons.sh. It
511 needs as a parameter the install path; if you run it from the
512 StatusNet dir, "." should suffice.
514 This will run eight (for now) queue handlers:
516 * xmppdaemon.php - listens for new XMPP messages from users and stores
517 them as notices in the database.
518 * jabberqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
519 registered users who should receive them.
520 * publicqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices in the database to
521 public feed listeners.
522 * ombqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to OpenMicroBlogging
523 recipients on foreign servers.
524 * smsqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to SMS-over-email addresses
526 * xmppconfirmhandler.php - sends confirmation messages to registered
528 * twitterqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Twitter for user
529 who have opted to set up Twitter bridging.
530 * facebookqueuehandler.php - sends queued notices to Facebook for users
531 of the built-in Facebook application.
533 Note that these queue daemons are pretty raw, and need your care. In
534 particular, they leak memory, and you may want to restart them on a
535 regular (daily or so) basis with a cron job. Also, if they lose
536 the connection to the XMPP server for too long, they'll simply die. It
537 may be a good idea to use a daemon-monitoring service, like 'monit',
538 to check their status and keep them running.
540 All the daemons write their process IDs (pids) to /var/run/ by
541 default. This can be useful for starting, stopping, and monitoring the
544 Since version 0.8.0, it's now possible to use a STOMP server instead of
545 our kind of hacky home-grown DB-based queue solution. See the "queues"
546 config section below for how to configure to use STOMP. As of this
547 writing, the software has been tested with ActiveMQ (
554 As of 0.8.1, OAuth is used to to access protected resources on Twitter
555 instead of HTTP Basic Auth. To use Twitter bridging you will need
556 to register your instance of StatusNet as an application on Twitter
557 (http://twitter.com/apps), and update the following variables in your
558 config.php with the consumer key and secret Twitter generates for you:
560 $config['twitter']['consumer_key'] = 'YOURKEY';
561 $config['twitter']['consumer_secret'] = 'YOURSECRET';
563 When registering your application with Twitter set the type to "Browser"
564 and your Callback URL to:
566 http://example.org/mublog/twitter/authorization
568 The default access type should be, "Read & Write".
570 * Importing statuses from Twitter
572 To allow your users to import their friends' Twitter statuses, you will
573 need to enable the bidirectional Twitter bridge in config.php:
575 $config['twitterbridge']['enabled'] = true;
577 and run the TwitterStatusFetcher daemon (scripts/twitterstatusfetcher.php).
578 Additionally, you will want to set the integration source variable,
579 which will keep notices posted to Twitter via StatusNet from looping
580 back. The integration source should be set to the name of your
581 application, exactly as you specified it on the settings page for your
582 StatusNet application on Twitter, e.g.:
584 $config['integration']['source'] = 'YourApp';
586 * Twitter Friends Syncing
588 Users may set a flag in their settings ("Subscribe to my Twitter friends
589 here" under the Twitter tab) to have StatusNet attempt to locate and
590 subscribe to "friends" (people they "follow") on Twitter who also have
591 accounts on your StatusNet system, and who have previously set up a link
592 for automatically posting notices to Twitter.
594 As of 0.8.0, this is no longer accomplished via a cron job. Instead you
595 must run the SyncTwitterFriends daemon (scripts/synctwitterfreinds.php).
597 Built-in Facebook Application
598 -----------------------------
600 StatusNet's Facebook application allows your users to automatically
601 update their Facebook statuses with their latest notices, invite
602 their friends to use the app (and thus your site), view their notice
603 timelines, and post notices -- all from within Facebook. The application
604 is built into StatusNet and runs on your host. For automatic Facebook
605 status updating to work you will need to enable queuing and run the
606 facebookqueuehandler.php daemon (see the "Queues and daemons" section
609 Quick setup instructions*:
611 Install the Facebook Developer application on Facebook:
613 http://www.facebook.com/developers/
615 Use it to create a new application and generate an API key and secret.
616 Uncomment the Facebook app section of your config.php and copy in the
617 key and secret, e.g.:
619 # Config section for the built-in Facebook application
620 $config['facebook']['apikey'] = 'APIKEY';
621 $config['facebook']['secret'] = 'SECRET';
623 In Facebook's application editor, specify the following URLs for your app:
625 - Canvas Callback URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/
626 - Post-Remove Callback URL: http://example.net/mublog/facebook/remove
627 - Post-Add Redirect URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
628 - Canvas Page URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/
630 (Replace 'example.net' with your host's URL, 'mublog' with the path
631 to your StatusNet installation, and 'yourapp' with the name of the
632 Facebook application you created.)
634 Additionally, Choose "Web" for Application type in the Advanced tab.
635 In the "Canvas setting" section, choose the "FBML" for Render Method,
636 "Smart Size" for IFrame size, and "Full width (760px)" for Canvas Width.
637 Everything else can be left with default values.
639 *For more detailed instructions please see the installation guide on the
642 http://status.net/trac/wiki/FacebookApplication
647 Sitemap files <http://sitemaps.org/> are a very nice way of telling
648 search engines and other interested bots what's available on your site
649 and what's changed recently. You can generate sitemap files for your
652 1. Choose your sitemap URL layout. StatusNet creates a number of
653 sitemap XML files for different parts of your site. You may want to
654 put these in a sub-directory of your StatusNet directory to avoid
655 clutter. The sitemap index file tells the search engines and other
656 bots where to find all the sitemap files; it *must* be in the main
657 installation directory or higher. Both types of file must be
658 available through HTTP.
660 2. To generate your sitemaps, run the following command on your server:
662 php scripts/sitemap.php -f index-file-path -d sitemap-directory -u URL-prefix-for-sitemaps
664 Here, index-file-path is the full path to the sitemap index file,
665 like './sitemapindex.xml'. sitemap-directory is the directory where
666 you want the sitemaps stored, like './sitemaps/' (make sure the dir
667 exists). URL-prefix-for-sitemaps is the full URL for the sitemap dir,
668 typically something like <http://example.net/mublog/sitemaps/>.
670 You can use several methods for submitting your sitemap index to
671 search engines to get your site indexed. One is to add a line like the
672 following to your robots.txt file:
674 Sitemap: /mublog/sitemapindex.xml
676 This is a good idea for letting *all* Web spiders know about your
677 sitemap. You can also submit sitemap files to major search engines
678 using their respective "Webmaster centres"; see sitemaps.org for links
684 There are two themes shipped with this version of StatusNet: "identica",
685 which is what the Identi.ca site uses, and "default", which is a good
686 basis for other sites.
688 As of right now, your ability to change the theme is site-wide; users
689 can't choose their own theme. Additionally, the only thing you can
690 change in the theme is CSS stylesheets and some image files; you can't
691 change the HTML output, like adding or removing menu items.
693 You can choose a theme using the $config['site']['theme'] element in
694 the config.php file. See below for details.
696 You can add your own theme by making a sub-directory of the 'theme'
697 subdirectory with the name of your theme. Each theme can have the
700 display.css: a CSS2 file for "default" styling for all browsers.
701 ie6.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
703 ie7.css: a CSS2 file for override styling for fixing up Internet
705 logo.png: a logo image for the site.
706 default-avatar-profile.png: a 96x96 pixel image to use as the avatar for
707 users who don't upload their own.
708 default-avatar-stream.png: Ditto, but 48x48. For streams of notices.
709 default-avatar-mini.png: Ditto ditto, but 24x24. For subscriptions
710 listing on profile pages.
712 You may want to start by copying the files from the default theme to
715 NOTE: the HTML generated by StatusNet changed *radically* between
716 version 0.6.x and 0.7.x. Older themes will need signification
717 modification to use the new output format.
722 Translations in StatusNet use the gettext system <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>.
723 Theoretically, you can add your own sub-directory to the locale/
724 subdirectory to add a new language to your system. You'll need to
725 compile the ".po" files into ".mo" files, however.
727 Contributions of translation information to StatusNet are very easy:
728 you can use the Web interface at http://status.net/pootle/ to add one
729 or a few or lots of new translations -- or even new languages. You can
730 also download more up-to-date .po files there, if you so desire.
735 There is no built-in system for doing backups in StatusNet. You can make
736 backups of a working StatusNet system by backing up the database and
737 the Web directory. To backup the database use mysqldump <http://ur1.ca/7xo>
738 and to backup the Web directory, try tar.
743 The administrator can set the "private" flag for a site so that it's
744 not visible to non-logged-in users. This might be useful for
745 workgroups who want to share a microblogging site for project
746 management, but host it on a public server.
748 Note that this is an experimental feature; total privacy is not
749 guaranteed or ensured. Also, privacy is all-or-nothing for a site; you
750 can't have some accounts or notices private, and others public.
751 Finally, the interaction of private sites with OpenMicroBlogging is
752 undefined. Remote users won't be able to subscribe to users on a
753 private site, but users of the private site may be able to subscribe
754 to users on a remote site. (Or not... it's not well tested.) The
755 "proper behaviour" hasn't been defined here, so handle with care.
760 IMPORTANT NOTE: StatusNet 0.7.4 introduced a fix for some
761 incorrectly-stored international characters ("UTF-8"). For new
762 installations, it will now store non-ASCII characters correctly.
763 However, older installations will have the incorrect storage, and will
764 consequently show up "wrong" in browsers. See below for how to deal
767 If you've been using StatusNet 0.7, 0.6, 0.5 or lower, or if you've
768 been tracking the "git" version of the software, you will probably
769 want to upgrade and keep your existing data. There is no automated
770 upgrade procedure in StatusNet 0.8.1. Try these step-by-step
771 instructions; read to the end first before trying them.
773 0. Download StatusNet and set up all the prerequisites as if you were
775 1. Make backups of both your database and your Web directory. UNDER NO
776 CIRCUMSTANCES should you try to do an upgrade without a known-good
777 backup. You have been warned.
778 2. Shut down Web access to your site, either by turning off your Web
779 server or by redirecting all pages to a "sorry, under maintenance"
781 3. Shut down XMPP access to your site, typically by shutting down the
782 xmppdaemon.php process and all other daemons that you're running.
783 If you've got "monit" or "cron" automatically restarting your
784 daemons, make sure to turn that off, too.
785 4. Shut down SMS and email access to your site. The easy way to do
786 this is to comment out the line piping incoming email to your
787 maildaemon.php file, and running something like "newaliases".
788 5. Once all writing processes to your site are turned off, make a
789 final backup of the Web directory and database.
790 6. Move your StatusNet directory to a backup spot, like "mublog.bak".
791 7. Unpack your StatusNet 0.8.1 tarball and move it to "mublog" or
792 wherever your code used to be.
793 8. Copy the config.php file and avatar directory from your old
794 directory to your new directory.
795 9. Copy htaccess.sample to .htaccess in the new directory. Change the
796 RewriteBase to use the correct path.
797 10. Rebuild the database. (You can safely skip this step and go to #12
798 if you're upgrading from another 0.8.x version).
800 NOTE: this step is destructive and cannot be
801 reversed. YOU CAN EASILY DESTROY YOUR SITE WITH THIS STEP. Don't
802 do it without a known-good backup!
804 If your database is at version 0.7.4, you can run a special upgrade
807 mysql -u<rootuser> -p<rootpassword> <database> db/074to080.sql
809 Otherwise, go to your StatusNet directory and AFTER YOU MAKE A
810 BACKUP run the rebuilddb.sh script like this:
812 ./scripts/rebuilddb.sh rootuser rootpassword database db/statusnet.sql
814 Here, rootuser and rootpassword are the username and password for a
815 user who can drop and create databases as well as tables; typically
816 that's _not_ the user StatusNet runs as. Note that rebuilddb.sh drops
817 your database and rebuilds it; if there is an error you have no
818 database. Make sure you have a backup.
819 For PostgreSQL databases there is an equivalent, rebuilddb_psql.sh,
820 which operates slightly differently. Read the documentation in that
821 script before running it.
822 11. Use mysql or psql client to log into your database and make sure that
823 the notice, user, profile, subscription etc. tables are non-empty.
824 12. Turn back on the Web server, and check that things still work.
825 13. Turn back on XMPP bots and email maildaemon. Note that the XMPP
826 bots have changed since version 0.5; see above for details.
828 If you're upgrading from very old versions, you may want to look at
829 the fixup_* scripts in the scripts directories. These will store some
830 precooked data in the DB. All upgraders should check out the inboxes
833 NOTE: the database definition file, laconica.ini, has been renamed to
834 statusnet.ini (since this is the recommended database name). If you
835 have a line in your config.php pointing to the old name, you'll need
841 Before version 0.6.2, the page showing all notices from people the
842 user is subscribed to ("so-and-so with friends") was calculated at run
843 time. Starting with 0.6.2, we have a new data structure for holding a
844 user's "notice inbox". (Note: distinct from the "message inbox", which
845 is the "inbox" tab in the UI. The notice inbox appears under the
848 Notices are added to the inbox when they're created. This speeds up
849 the query considerably, and also allows us the opportunity, in the
850 future, to add different kind of notices to an inbox -- like @-replies
851 or subscriptions to search terms or hashtags.
853 Notice inboxes are enabled by default for new installations. If you
854 are upgrading an existing site, this means that your users will see
855 empty "Personal" pages. The following steps will help you fix the
858 0. $config['inboxes']['enabled'] can be set to one of three values. If
859 you set it to 'false', the site will work as before. Support for this
860 will probably be dropped in future versions.
861 1. Setting the flag to 'transitional' means that you're in transition.
862 In this mode, the code will run the "new query" or the "old query"
863 based on whether the user's inbox has been updated.
864 2. After setting the flag to "transitional", you can run the
865 fixup_inboxes.php script to create the inboxes. You may want to set
866 the memory limit high. You can re-run it without ill effect.
867 3. When fixup_inboxes is finished, you can set the enabled flag to
870 NOTE: As of version 0.8.1 notice inboxes are automatically trimmed back
871 to ~1000 notices every once in a while.
873 NOTE: we will drop support for non-inboxed sites in the 0.9.x version
874 of StatusNet. It's time to switch now!
879 StatusNet 0.7.4 introduced a fix for some incorrectly-stored
880 international characters ("UTF-8"). This fix is not
881 backwards-compatible; installations from before 0.7.4 will show
882 non-ASCII characters of old notices incorrectly. This section explains
885 0. You can disable the new behaviour by setting the 'db''utf8' config
886 option to "false". You should only do this until you're ready to
887 convert your DB to the new format.
888 1. When you're ready to convert, you can run the fixup_utf8.php script
889 in the scripts/ subdirectory. If you've had the "new behaviour"
890 enabled (probably a good idea), you can give the ID of the first
891 "new" notice as a parameter, and only notices before that one will
892 be converted. Notices are converted in reverse chronological order,
893 so the most recent (and visible) ones will be converted first. The
894 script should work whether or not you have the 'db''utf8' config
896 2. When you're ready, set $config['db']['utf8'] to true, so that
897 new notices will be stored correctly.
899 Configuration options
900 =====================
902 The main configuration file for StatusNet (excepting configurations for
903 dependency software) is config.php in your StatusNet directory. If you
904 edit any other file in the directory, like lib/common.php (where most
905 of the defaults are defined), you will lose your configuration options
906 in any upgrade, and you will wish that you had been more careful.
908 Starting with version 0.7.1, you can put config files in the
909 /etc/statusnet/ directory on your server, if it exists. Config files
910 will be included in this order:
912 * /etc/statusnet/statusnet.php - server-wide config
913 * /etc/statusnet/<servername>.php - for a virtual host
914 * /etc/statusnet/<servername>_<pathname>.php - for a path
915 * INSTALLDIR/config.php - for a particular implementation
917 Almost all configuration options are made through a two-dimensional
918 associative array, cleverly named $config. A typical configuration
921 $config['section']['option'] = value;
923 For brevity, the following documentation describes each section and
929 This section is a catch-all for site-wide variables.
931 name: the name of your site, like 'YourCompany Microblog'.
932 server: the server part of your site's URLs, like 'example.net'.
933 path: The path part of your site's URLs, like 'mublog' or ''
935 fancy: whether or not your site uses fancy URLs (see Fancy URLs
936 section above). Default is false.
937 logfile: full path to a file for StatusNet to save logging
938 information to. You may want to use this if you don't have
940 logdebug: whether to log additional debug info like backtraces on
941 hard errors. Default false.
942 locale_path: full path to the directory for locale data. Unless you
943 store all your locale data in one place, you probably
944 don't need to use this.
945 language: default language for your site. Defaults to US English.
946 languages: A list of languages supported on your site. Typically you'd
947 only change this if you wanted to disable support for one
949 "unset($config['site']['languages']['de'])" will disable
951 theme: Theme for your site (see Theme section). Two themes are
952 provided by default: 'default' and 'stoica' (the one used by
953 Identi.ca). It's appreciated if you don't use the 'stoica' theme
954 except as the basis for your own.
955 email: contact email address for your site. By default, it's extracted
956 from your Web server environment; you may want to customize it.
957 broughtbyurl: name of an organization or individual who provides the
958 service. Each page will include a link to this name in the
959 footer. A good way to link to the blog, forum, wiki,
960 corporate portal, or whoever is making the service available.
961 broughtby: text used for the "brought by" link.
962 timezone: default timezone for message display. Users can set their
963 own time zone. Defaults to 'UTC', which is a pretty good default.
964 closed: If set to 'true', will disallow registration on your site.
965 This is a cheap way to restrict accounts to only one
966 individual or group; just register the accounts you want on
967 the service, *then* set this variable to 'true'.
968 inviteonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registration if the user
969 was invited by an existing user.
970 openidonly: If set to 'true', will only allow registrations and logins
972 private: If set to 'true', anonymous users will be redirected to the
973 'login' page. Also, API methods that normally require no
974 authentication will require it. Note that this does not turn
975 off registration; use 'closed' or 'inviteonly' for the
977 notice: A plain string that will appear on every page. A good place
978 to put introductory information about your service, or info about
979 upgrades and outages, or other community info. Any HTML will
981 logo: URL of an image file to use as the logo for the site. Overrides
982 the logo in the theme, if any.
983 ssl: Whether to use SSL and https:// URLs for some or all pages.
984 Possible values are 'always' (use it for all pages), 'never'
985 (don't use it for any pages), or 'sometimes' (use it for
986 sensitive pages that include passwords like login and registration,
987 but not for regular pages). Default to 'never'.
988 sslserver: use an alternate server name for SSL URLs, like
989 'secure.example.org'. You should be careful to set cookie
990 parameters correctly so that both the SSL server and the
991 "normal" server can access the session cookie and
992 preferably other cookies as well.
993 shorturllength: Length of URL at which URLs in a message exceeding 140
994 characters will be sent to the user's chosen
996 dupelimit: minimum time allowed for one person to say the same thing
997 twice. Default 60s. Anything lower is considered a user
1003 This section is a reference to the configuration options for
1004 DB_DataObject (see <http://ur1.ca/7xp>). The ones that you may want to
1005 set are listed below for clarity.
1007 database: a DSN (Data Source Name) for your StatusNet database. This is
1008 in the format 'protocol://username:password@hostname/databasename',
1009 where 'protocol' is 'mysql' or 'mysqli' (or possibly 'postgresql', if you
1010 really know what you're doing), 'username' is the username,
1011 'password' is the password, and etc.
1012 ini_yourdbname: if your database is not named 'statusnet', you'll need
1013 to set this to point to the location of the
1014 statusnet.ini file. Note that the real name of your database
1015 should go in there, not literally 'yourdbname'.
1016 db_driver: You can try changing this to 'MDB2' to use the other driver
1017 type for DB_DataObject, but note that it breaks the OpenID
1018 libraries, which only support PEAR::DB.
1019 debug: On a database error, you may get a message saying to set this
1020 value to 5 to see debug messages in the browser. This breaks
1021 just about all pages, and will also expose the username and
1023 quote_identifiers: Set this to true if you're using postgresql.
1024 type: either 'mysql' or 'postgresql' (used for some bits of
1025 database-type-specific SQL in the code). Defaults to mysql.
1026 mirror: you can set this to an array of DSNs, like the above
1027 'database' value. If it's set, certain read-only actions will
1028 use a random value out of this array for the database, rather
1029 than the one in 'database' (actually, 'database' is overwritten).
1030 You can offload a busy DB server by setting up MySQL replication
1031 and adding the slaves to this array. Note that if you want some
1032 requests to go to the 'database' (master) server, you'll need
1033 to include it in this array, too.
1034 utf8: whether to talk to the database in UTF-8 mode. This is the default
1035 with new installations, but older sites may want to turn it off
1036 until they get their databases fixed up. See "UTF-8 database"
1042 By default, StatusNet sites log error messages to the syslog facility.
1043 (You can override this using the 'logfile' parameter described above).
1045 appname: The name that StatusNet uses to log messages. By default it's
1046 "statusnet", but if you have more than one installation on the
1047 server, you may want to change the name for each instance so
1048 you can track log messages more easily.
1049 priority: level to log at. Currently ignored.
1050 facility: what syslog facility to used. Defaults to LOG_USER, only
1051 reset if you know what syslog is and have a good reason
1057 You can configure the software to queue time-consuming tasks, like
1058 sending out SMS email or XMPP messages, for off-line processing. See
1059 'Queues and daemons' above for how to set this up.
1061 enabled: Whether to uses queues. Defaults to false.
1062 subsystem: Which kind of queueserver to use. Values include "db" for
1063 our hacked-together database queuing (no other server
1064 required) and "stomp" for a stomp server.
1065 stomp_server: "broker URI" for stomp server. Something like
1066 "tcp://hostname:61613". More complicated ones are
1067 possible; see your stomp server's documentation for
1069 queue_basename: a root name to use for queues (stomp only). Typically
1070 something like '/queue/sitename/' makes sense.
1071 stomp_username: username for connecting to the stomp server; defaults
1073 stomp_password: password for connecting to the stomp server; defaults
1078 The default license to use for your users notices. The default is the
1079 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is probably the right
1080 choice for any public site. Note that some other servers will not
1081 accept notices if you apply a stricter license than this.
1083 url: URL of the license, used for links.
1084 title: Title for the license, like 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0'.
1085 image: A button shown on each page for the license.
1090 This is for configuring out-going email. We use PEAR's Mail module,
1091 see: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail.factory.php
1093 backend: the backend to use for mail, one of 'mail', 'sendmail', and
1094 'smtp'. Defaults to PEAR's default, 'mail'.
1095 params: if the mail backend requires any parameters, you can provide
1096 them in an associative array.
1101 This is for configuring nicknames in the service.
1103 blacklist: an array of strings for usernames that may not be
1104 registered. A default array exists for strings that are
1105 used by StatusNet (e.g. 'doc', 'main', 'avatar', 'theme')
1106 but you may want to add others if you have other software
1107 installed in a subdirectory of StatusNet or if you just
1108 don't want certain words used as usernames.
1109 featured: an array of nicknames of 'featured' users of the site.
1110 Can be useful to draw attention to well-known users, or
1111 interesting people, or whatever.
1116 For configuring avatar access.
1118 dir: Directory to look for avatar files and to put them into.
1119 Defaults to avatar subdirectory of install directory; if
1120 you change it, make sure to change path, too.
1121 path: Path to avatars. Defaults to path for avatar subdirectory,
1122 but you can change it if you wish. Note that this will
1123 be included with the avatar server, too.
1124 server: If set, defines another server where avatars are stored in the
1125 root directory. Note that the 'avatar' subdir still has to be
1126 writeable. You'd typically use this to split HTTP requests on
1127 the client to speed up page loading, either with another
1128 virtual server or with an NFS or SAMBA share. Clients
1129 typically only make 2 connections to a single server at a
1130 time <http://ur1.ca/6ih>, so this can parallelize the job.
1136 For configuring the public stream.
1138 localonly: If set to true, only messages posted by users of this
1139 service (rather than other services, filtered through OMB)
1140 are shown in the public stream. Default true.
1141 blacklist: An array of IDs of users to hide from the public stream.
1142 Useful if you have someone making excessive Twitterfeed posts
1143 to the site, other kinds of automated posts, testing bots, etc.
1144 autosource: Sources of notices that are from automatic posters, and thus
1145 should be kept off the public timeline. Default empty.
1150 server: Like avatars, you can speed up page loading by pointing the
1151 theme file lookup to another server (virtual or real).
1152 Defaults to NULL, meaning to use the site server.
1153 dir: Directory where theme files are stored. Used to determine
1154 whether to show parts of a theme file. Defaults to the theme
1155 subdirectory of the install directory.
1156 path: Path part of theme URLs, before the theme name. Relative to the
1157 theme server. It may make sense to change this path when upgrading,
1158 (using version numbers as the path) to make sure that all files are
1159 reloaded by caching clients or proxies. Defaults to null,
1160 which means to use the site path + '/theme'.
1165 For configuring the XMPP sub-system.
1167 enabled: Whether to accept and send messages by XMPP. Default false.
1168 server: server part of XMPP ID for update user.
1169 port: connection port for clients. Default 5222, which you probably
1170 shouldn't need to change.
1171 user: username for the client connection. Users will receive messages
1172 from 'user'@'server'.
1173 resource: a unique identifier for the connection to the server. This
1174 is actually used as a prefix for each XMPP component in the system.
1175 password: password for the user account.
1176 host: some XMPP domains are served by machines with a different
1177 hostname. (For example, @gmail.com GTalk users connect to
1178 talk.google.com). Set this to the correct hostname if that's the
1179 case with your server.
1180 encryption: Whether to encrypt the connection between StatusNet and the
1181 XMPP server. Defaults to true, but you can get
1182 considerably better performance turning it off if you're
1183 connecting to a server on the same machine or on a
1185 debug: if turned on, this will make the XMPP library blurt out all of
1186 the incoming and outgoing messages as XML stanzas. Use as a
1187 last resort, and never turn it on if you don't have queues
1188 enabled, since it will spit out sensitive data to the browser.
1189 public: an array of JIDs to send _all_ notices to. This is useful for
1190 participating in third-party search and archiving services.
1195 For configuring invites.
1197 enabled: Whether to allow users to send invites. Default true.
1202 For configuring OpenID.
1204 enabled: Whether to allow users to register and login using OpenID. Default
1210 Miscellaneous tagging stuff.
1212 dropoff: Decay factor for tag listing, in seconds.
1213 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
1214 with it to try and get better results for your site.
1219 Settings for the "popular" section of the site.
1221 dropoff: Decay factor for popularity listing, in seconds.
1222 Defaults to exponential decay over ten days; you can twiddle
1223 with it to try and get better results for your site.
1228 For daemon processes.
1230 piddir: directory that daemon processes should write their PID file
1231 (process ID) to. Defaults to /var/run/, which is where this
1232 stuff should usually go on Unix-ish systems.
1233 user: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective user ID
1234 to this user before running. Probably a good idea, especially if
1235 you start the daemons as root. Note: user name, like 'daemon',
1237 group: If set, the daemons will try to change their effective group ID
1238 to this named group. Again, a name, not a numerical ID.
1243 You can get a significant boost in performance by caching some
1244 database data in memcached <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>.
1246 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1247 server: a string with the hostname of the memcached server. Can also
1248 be an array of hostnames, if you've got more than one server.
1249 base: memcached uses key-value pairs to store data. We build long,
1250 funny-looking keys to make sure we don't have any conflicts. The
1251 base of the key is usually a simplified version of the site name
1252 (like "Identi.ca" => "identica"), but you can overwrite this if
1253 you need to. You can safely ignore it if you only have one
1254 StatusNet site using your memcached server.
1255 port: Port to connect to; defaults to 11211.
1260 You can get a significant boost in performance using Sphinx Search
1261 instead of your database server to search for users and notices.
1262 <http://sphinxsearch.com/>.
1264 enabled: Set to true to enable. Default false.
1265 server: a string with the hostname of the sphinx server.
1266 port: an integer with the port number of the sphinx server.
1273 enabled: Whether to enable post-by-email. Defaults to true. You will
1274 also need to set up maildaemon.php.
1279 For SMS integration.
1281 enabled: Whether to enable SMS integration. Defaults to true. Queues
1282 should also be enabled.
1287 For Twitter integration
1289 enabled: Whether to enable Twitter integration. Defaults to true.
1290 Queues should also be enabled.
1295 A catch-all for integration with other systems.
1297 source: The name to use for the source of posts to Twitter. Defaults
1298 to 'statusnet', but if you request your own source name from
1299 Twitter <http://twitter.com/help/request_source>, you can use
1300 that here instead. Status updates on Twitter will then have
1302 taguri: base for tag:// URIs. Defaults to site-server + ',2009'.
1309 enabled: A three-valued flag for whether to use notice inboxes (see
1310 upgrading info above for notes about this change). Can be
1311 'false', 'true', or '"transitional"'.
1316 For notice-posting throttles.
1318 enabled: Whether to throttle posting. Defaults to false.
1319 count: Each user can make this many posts in 'timespan' seconds. So, if count
1320 is 100 and timespan is 3600, then there can be only 100 posts
1321 from a user every hour.
1322 timespan: see 'count'.
1329 banned: an array of usernames and/or profile IDs of 'banned' profiles.
1330 The site will reject any notices by these users -- they will
1331 not be accepted at all. (Compare with blacklisted users above,
1332 whose posts just won't show up in the public stream.)
1337 Options with new users.
1339 default: nickname of a user account to automatically subscribe new
1340 users to. Typically this would be system account for e.g.
1341 service updates or announcements. Users are able to unsub
1342 if they want. Default is null; no auto subscribe.
1343 welcome: nickname of a user account that sends welcome messages to new
1344 users. Can be the same as 'default' account, although on
1345 busy servers it may be a good idea to keep that one just for
1346 'urgent' messages. Default is null; no message.
1348 If either of these special user accounts are specified, the users should
1349 be created before the configuration is updated.
1354 The software will, by default, send statistical snapshots about the
1355 local installation to a stats server on the status.net Web site. This
1356 data is used by the developers to prioritize development decisions. No
1357 identifying data about users or organizations is collected. The data
1358 is available to the public for review. Participating in this survey
1359 helps StatusNet developers take your needs into account when updating
1362 run: string indicating when to run the statistics. Values can be 'web'
1363 (run occasionally at Web time), 'cron' (run from a cron script),
1364 or 'never' (don't ever run). If you set it to 'cron', remember to
1365 schedule the script to run on a regular basis.
1366 frequency: if run value is 'web', how often to report statistics.
1367 Measured in Web hits; depends on how active your site is.
1368 Default is 10000 -- that is, one report every 10000 Web hits,
1370 reporturl: URL to post statistics to. Defaults to StatusNet developers'
1371 report system, but if they go evil or disappear you may
1372 need to update this to another value. Note: if you
1373 don't want to report stats, it's much better to
1374 set 'run' to 'never' than to set this value to something
1380 The software lets users upload files with their notices. You can configure
1381 the types of accepted files by mime types and a trio of quota options:
1382 per file, per user (total), per user per month.
1384 We suggest the use of the pecl file_info extension to handle mime type
1387 supported: an array of mime types you accept to store and distribute,
1388 like 'image/gif', 'video/mpeg', 'audio/mpeg', etc. Make sure you
1389 setup your server to properly recognize the types you want to
1391 uploads: false to disable uploading files with notices (true by default).
1392 filecommand: The required MIME_Type library may need to use the 'file'
1393 command. It tries the one in the Web server's path, but if
1394 you're having problems with uploads, try setting this to the
1395 correct value. Note: 'file' must accept '-b' and '-i' options.
1397 For quotas, be sure you've set the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size
1398 in php.ini to be large enough to handle your upload. In httpd.conf
1399 (if you're using apache), check that the LimitRequestBody directive isn't
1400 set too low (it's optional, so it may not be there at all).
1402 file_quota: maximum size for a single file upload in bytes. A user can send
1403 any amount of notices with attachments as long as each attachment
1404 is smaller than file_quota.
1405 user_quota: total size in bytes a user can store on this server. Each user
1406 can store any number of files as long as their total size does
1407 not exceed the user_quota.
1408 monthly_quota: total size permitted in the current month. This is the total
1409 size in bytes that a user can upload each month.
1410 dir: directory accessible to the Web process where uploads should go.
1411 Defaults to the 'file' subdirectory of the install directory, which
1412 should be writeable by the Web user.
1413 server: server name to use when creating URLs for uploaded files.
1414 Defaults to null, meaning to use the default Web server. Using
1415 a virtual server here can speed up Web performance.
1416 path: URL path, relative to the server, to find files. Defaults to
1417 main path + '/file/'.
1418 filecommand: command to use for determining the type of a file. May be
1419 skipped if fileinfo extension is installed. Defaults to
1425 Options for group functionality.
1427 maxaliases: maximum number of aliases a group can have. Default 3. Set
1428 to 0 or less to prevent aliases in a group.
1433 oEmbed endpoint for multimedia attachments (links in posts).
1435 endpoint: oohembed endpoint using http://oohembed.com/ software.
1440 Some stuff for search.
1442 type: type of search. Ignored if PostgreSQL or Sphinx are enabled. Can either
1443 be 'fulltext' (default) or 'like'. The former is faster and more efficient
1444 but requires the lame old MyISAM engine for MySQL. The latter
1445 will work with InnoDB but could be miserably slow on large
1446 systems. We'll probably add another type sometime in the future,
1447 with our own indexing system (maybe like MediaWiki's).
1454 handle: boolean. Whether we should register our own PHP session-handling
1455 code (using the database and memcache if enabled). Defaults to false.
1456 Setting this to true makes some sense on large or multi-server
1457 sites, but it probably won't hurt for smaller ones, either.
1458 debug: whether to output debugging info for session storage. Can help
1459 with weird session bugs, sometimes. Default false.
1464 Users can upload backgrounds for their pages; this section defines
1467 server: the server to use for background. Using a separate (even
1468 virtual) server for this can speed up load times. Default is
1469 null; same as site server.
1470 dir: directory to write backgrounds too. Default is '/background/'
1471 subdir of install dir.
1472 path: path to backgrounds. Default is sub-path of install path; note
1473 that you may need to change this if you change site-path too.
1478 A bi-direction bridge to Twitter (http://twitter.com/).
1480 enabled: default false. If true, will show user's Twitter friends'
1481 notices in their inbox and faves pages, only to the user. You
1482 must also run the twitterstatusfetcher.php script.
1487 Using the "XML-RPC Ping" method initiated by weblogs.com, the site can
1488 notify third-party servers of updates.
1490 notify: an array of URLs for ping endpoints. Default is the empty
1491 array (no notification).
1496 Default design (colors and background) for the site. Actual appearance
1497 depends on the theme. Null values mean to use the theme defaults.
1499 backgroundcolor: Hex color of the site background.
1500 contentcolor: Hex color of the content area background.
1501 sidebarcolor: Hex color of the sidebar background.
1502 textcolor: Hex color of all non-link text.
1503 linkcolor: Hex color of all links.
1504 backgroundimage: Image to use for the background.
1505 disposition: Flags for whether or not to tile the background image.
1510 Beginning with the 0.7.x branch, StatusNet has supported a simple but
1511 powerful plugin architecture. Important events in the code are named,
1512 like 'StartNoticeSave', and other software can register interest
1513 in those events. When the events happen, the other software is called
1514 and has a choice of accepting or rejecting the events.
1516 In the simplest case, you can add a function to config.php and use the
1517 Event::addHandler() function to hook an event:
1519 function AddGoogleLink($action)
1521 $action->menuItem('http://www.google.com/', _('Google'), _('Search engine'));
1525 Event::addHandler('EndPrimaryNav', 'AddGoogleLink');
1527 This adds a menu item to the end of the main navigation menu. You can
1528 see the list of existing events, and parameters that handlers must
1529 implement, in EVENTS.txt.
1531 The Plugin class in lib/plugin.php makes it easier to write more
1532 complex plugins. Sub-classes can just create methods named
1533 'onEventName', where 'EventName' is the name of the event (case
1534 matters!). These methods will be automatically registered as event
1535 handlers by the Plugin constructor (which you must call from your own
1536 class's constructor).
1538 Several example plugins are included in the plugins/ directory. You
1539 can enable a plugin with the following line in config.php:
1541 addPlugin('Example', array('param1' => 'value1',
1542 'param2' => 'value2'));
1544 This will look for and load files named 'ExamplePlugin.php' or
1545 'Example/ExamplePlugin.php' either in the plugins/ directory (for
1546 plugins that ship with StatusNet) or in the local/ directory (for
1547 plugins you write yourself or that you get from somewhere else) or
1550 Plugins are documented in their own directories.
1555 The primary output for StatusNet is syslog, unless you configured a
1556 separate logfile. This is probably the first place to look if you're
1557 getting weird behaviour from StatusNet.
1559 If you're tracking the unstable version of StatusNet in the git
1560 repository (see below), and you get a compilation error ("unexpected
1561 T_STRING") in the browser, check to see that you don't have any
1562 conflicts in your code.
1564 If you upgraded to StatusNet 0.8.1 without reading the "Notice
1565 inboxes" section above, and all your users' 'Personal' tabs are empty,
1566 read the "Notice inboxes" section above.
1571 These are some myths you may see on the Web about StatusNet.
1572 Documentation from the core team about StatusNet has been pretty
1573 sparse, so some backtracking and guesswork resulted in some incorrect
1576 - "Set $config['db']['debug'] = 5 to debug the database." This is an
1577 extremely bad idea. It's a tool built into DB_DataObject that will
1578 emit oodles of print lines directly to the browser of your users.
1579 Among these lines will be your database username and password. Do
1580 not enable this option on a production Web site for any reason.
1582 - "Edit dataobject.ini with the following settings..." dataobject.ini
1583 is a development file for the DB_DataObject framework and is not
1584 used by the running software. It was removed from the StatusNet
1585 distribution because its presence was confusing. Do not bother
1586 configuring dataobject.ini, and do not put your database username
1587 and password into the file on a production Web server; unscrupulous
1588 persons may try to read it to get your passwords.
1593 If you're adventurous or impatient, you may want to install the
1594 development version of StatusNet. To get it, use the git version
1595 control tool <http://git-scm.com/> like so:
1597 git clone git@gitorious.org:statusnet/mainline.git
1599 This is the version of the software that runs on Identi.ca and the
1600 status.net hosted service. Using it is a mixed bag. On the positive
1601 side, it usually includes the latest security and bug fix patches. On
1602 the downside, it may also include changes that require admin
1603 intervention (like running a script or even raw SQL!) that may not be
1604 documented yet. It may be a good idea to test this version before
1605 installing it on your production machines.
1607 To keep it up-to-date, use 'git pull'. Watch for conflicts!
1612 There are several ways to get more information about StatusNet.
1614 * There is a mailing list for StatusNet developers and admins at
1615 http://mail.status.net/mailman/listinfo/statusnet-dev
1616 * The #statusnet IRC channel on freenode.net <http://www.freenode.net/>.
1617 * The StatusNet wiki, http://status.net/wiki/
1618 * The StatusNet blog, http://status.net/blog/
1619 * The StatusNet status update, <http://status.status.net/status> (!)
1624 * Microblogging messages to http://identi.ca/evan are very welcome.
1625 * StatusNet's Trac server has a bug tracker for any defects you may find,
1626 or ideas for making things better. http://status.net/trac/
1627 * e-mail to evan@status.net will usually be read and responded to very
1628 quickly, unless the question is really hard.
1633 The following is an incomplete list of developers who've worked on
1634 StatusNet. Apologies for any oversight; please let evan@status.net know
1635 if anyone's been overlooked in error.
1637 * Evan Prodromou, founder and lead developer, StatusNet, Inc.
1638 * Zach Copley, StatusNet, Inc.
1639 * Earle Martin, StatusNet, Inc.
1640 * Marie-Claude Doyon, designer, StatusNet, Inc.
1641 * Sarven Capadisli, StatusNet, Inc.
1642 * Robin Millette, StatusNet, Inc.
1653 * Tryggvi Björgvinsson
1657 * Ken Sheppardson (Trac server, man-about-town)
1658 * Tiago 'gouki' Faria (i18n manager)
1660 * Leslie Michael Orchard
1664 * Tobias Diekershoff
1673 Thanks also to the developers of our upstream library code and to the
1674 thousands of people who have tried out Identi.ca, installed StatusNet,
1675 told their friends, and built the Open Microblogging network to what